families: explanations of demographic changes

changing social attitudes

- up until the 1960s, there was strong social pressure for couples to marry before setting up a home, and in the case of pregnancy outside of marriage, young women were expected to marry the father or give the child up for adoption
- cohabitation and sexual relationships outside of marriage are more socially acceptable (supported by British social attitudes survey)

British Social Attitudes Survey (Park et al.)

- 1989 → 71% agreed that 'people who want children ought to get married'
- 2012 → 42% agreed that 'people who want children ought to get married' and 75% believed that sex before marriage was 'rarely wrong' or 'not wrong at all'

decline of family values

- new right says that the declining popularity of marriage is a result of the weakening of traditional family values
- marriage is the bedrock of stable family life and alternatives such as cohabitation aren't substitutes, as they're more likely to break up than marriage relationships
- Morgan: governments have given insufficient support to marriage through public support to marriage as an institution and in terms of financial support through the tax and benefit system for married couples with children

individualisation

- beck and beck-gernsheim
- giddens

Beck and Beck

- individuals are no longer bound to traditional norms such as loyalty to family and seek a lifestyle and relationships that fulfils their needs as individuals instead.
- many see alternatives to marriage as having more freedom and less risk than conventional marriage

Giddens

- in contemporary society there has been a transformation of intimacy; people no longer seek romantic love but confluent love instead
- those who marry are more likely to break up when they can no longer find confluent love
- quality of intimate relationships are improving especially for women who are no longer trapped in unhappy marriages

the changing role of women

- Greer: the decline in marriages is a result of women no longer accepting oppression by their husbands
- supported by Sharpe
- Langford says that many women still fear being alone: love is still seen as a natural basis for relationships and a way people can transcend in a meaningless and alienating world; however in reality love ends up concealing the way in which men exercise power and control in women.

the continuing importance of marriage

- people may be delaying marriage, not rejecting it
- Women have become more career oriented so are waiting until their 30s to marry. Many people who cohabitate go on to marry
- in 2012, around a third of marriages were remarriages → the high level of divorce hasn't prevented people from marrying again
- in 2013, over 12.2 million families were married-couple families (around 67%)

trends in divorce

- 2011: the UK had a divorce rate of 2.1 per 1000 of all adults
- 1960: over 23000 divorces, 1993: 165000 divorces, 2012: 118000 divorces (decr because less marriages)

explanations for changing divorce rates

- divorce became much easier which gave many more people the option of escaping unhappy marriages the change in legislation reflected the growing public demand for easier divorce
- privatised nuclear families: high divorce rates goes hand in hand with a trend towards nuclear families
- Parson and Bales
- Leach

Parson and bales

argue that the American family has become structurally isolated from extended family with the main focus on the relationship between husband, wife and children, means there is less pressure on from extended family for a couple to stay together

leach

the nuclear family was the 'source of all our discontents', and the relationship between the husband and wife was overloaded with emotional needs for the couple - there was no surprise that nuclear families were a source of conflict

Fletcher

higher divorce rates were linked to a higher value being placed on marriage as couples had higher expectations of love and mutual support rather than one based on economic and practical reasons

Chambers

highlights a range of evidence that 'divorce, cohabitation and lone parenthood are still viewed with dominant public discourses as signs of moral decline, despite being widespread' - believes that divorce still has a negative stigma despite being a popular decision

Crowe

the changing position of women in society has been one of the main factors influencing a rise in the number of divorces because they have more financial independence

How many divorces are initiated by women?

65%